Hands On: Unboxing the Fake Intel Core i7-920

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By now, you’ve probably seen many of the homemade videos from people who ordered an Intel Core i7-920 processor from Newegg.com and received a bogus processor and hunk of plastic shaped like a fan. Newegg has thrown
supplier IPEX Infotech of Freemont [corrected] California under the bus for this fiasco; in a statement released to Information Week, the retailer said, “We have since come to discover the CPUs were counterfeit and are terminating our relationship with this supplier.”

PCMag.com did not order one. But luckily for us, my
neighbor, Microsoft TechNet columnist Greg Steen, just happened to be one of the lucky 200 or so buyers, and he let me borrow it for the day. As you can see, the box looks very real, and the weight of the package is perfect. Lots more images after the jump!

The labels look very good; notice the
embossed fake hologram in the left corner. But you can also see that that the word “socket ” is spelled wrong. “Sochet”?

Looking into the package, it appears that there is an actual CPU inside.

From
this angle, it looks like you’re seeing the top of the CPU cooler.

When we opened the box, we discovered that what we thought was a CPU fan was
actually a sticker on a piece of molded plastic.

The
plastic “fan” was the approximate shape of the proper cooler, but it was
hardly Socket 1366.

The CPU looked official at
first glace, although the staple should have warned us.

When
turned it over, we quickly discovered that this was not a real processor.
It looked and felt a lot like lead.